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Is Paintball Expensive?

Dusty

Don't run, you'll only die tired....
May 19, 2004
7,606
2,407
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Northern Ireland
to be fair to the other activities, they're more priced on a constant half hour of action. Paintball sites tend to spend a fair chunk of time kitting people out, safety briefing, explaining games. The average player is lucky to see 5 or 10 minutes action at a time with a bit of hanging about in between times. if you play 8 games in a day that's somewhere between 40 and 80 minutes of trigger time.

Plus, do you really get away with £40? Buy extra pods and you're upping the price considerably.

Anyway, for regular players like who frequent our beloved forum, take the cost of paintball over a year including marker, tournaments, big games, training etc and it probably does work out expensive. Doesn't matter though, it's still more fun than anything else :D
 

Liam92

#16 Reading Entity
Nov 4, 2009
2,371
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Glasgow, Scotland
I'd say your analysis is flawed solely because we don't play paintball for 7 hours across any format. Lets consider the various formats of paintball you can play.

rental days: a £40 package may get you around 700 paintballs at a site with good deals, less for bigger chains. This would last any normal player between 6 and 8 games I'd say, and if game time averages out at 30 minutes each (which it won't as most normal rental games last 10-15 minutes max) you're going to play an absolute maximum of 4 hours. realistically you'd be lucky if you actually play any more than 1.5 to 2 hours. real cost of 7 hours play: £140
scenario games: much longer game time, main sunday games will probably run for around the 6 hour mark total. Ticket costs for weekend events are in the region of £80 not including any paint, travel, accomodation, food etc. So again, being conservative with paint you might be able to get away with using a case of paint per day, but lets be honest you won't see much action over 6 hours with 1 case. So again, once you include a reasonable amount of paint as well as other miscellaneous costs for the weekend, most players will probably spend on average around £80 per day at a major scenario event. real cost of 7 hours play: £93
Tournaments: Well the cheapest tournament I've ever been able to play is student cup and thats because its pretty much zero profit arranged by students themselves. At the event just the other week my team probably spent around £120 per person for 2 days play including the cheapest accommodation and transport. So £60 per day for around 8 games with regulation time of (i think) 12 minutes each. 90% games finished well within regulation time but thats still an absolute maximum of 1hr 14mins of playing paintball. real cost of 7 hours play: £300. I wont even begin to scare anybody by calculating the cost per hour of play for major leagues like the millennium. I'm sure I calculated for a CPS event i played that it worked out something crazy like £20 every point i played, some of which i might be shot of the break after a few seconds.

So yes its still not the most expensive hobby in the whole wide world but we can't pretend that its cheaper than some of your examples like watching football or going to the cinema. Those calculations I've made are all VERY conservative and are likely to actually be a lot higher in practise for most players. and it also doesn't include any costs at all for equipment which most people will buy.

Is it still worth playing? absolutely in my mind but it is definitely not a small budget hobby.
 
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Pog49

49
May 13, 2009
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Paintball, like anything, CAN be very expensive but it doesn't have to be!
 

Merk

Invictuz
Mar 17, 2016
38
1
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Chesterfield
It depends on how often you play, and the kind of paintball that you play to how much it will cost you. In the long run, going on walkons will probably save money on the likes of paint.
 

Mikee2793

Member
Apr 5, 2016
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It can be expensive, I've just started really, few months in now, I've bought most stuff but I could have borrowed from teammates but I like having my own gear which is why I bought it, second hand items keeps any cost for gear down